January Newsletter

In this issue

The New Year often ushers in the release of new budgets and in this issue, we have two budget items for you - the first relates to e-learning materials - how much should you be paying and why do vendors' quotes vary so much? The second offers some key pointers to make sure that a planned investment in a new HR system is on the right footing. We continue this theme with an excerpt from our report for The Best Practice Club on 'Creating the conditions for success'.

We would also like to bring to your attention the latest release of our competence assessment tool - Talent Insight™ 3.0, specifically designed for either smaller organisations or business units.

In Other News below, we have the results of the Situational Judgement Test survey and Christmas competition - did you suggest using the bridge or did you try to make a run for it?! Who decided what the 'right' answer was anyway?

See also a new case study on the use of SJTs in the legal sector and a dedicated area on our web site for Human Resources professionals.

E-learning - how much per hour?

Ask a supplier the question, "How much should I expect to pay for an e-learning project?" and after some muttering, mumbling and exchanges of awkward glances, you might get an answer such as "Less then a million pounds!"

With nearly 20 years of experience in the field, our consultant Alex Welsh offers a framework to unpick the key drivers of price and cost and arrive at a more useful estimate for a project. It's bang-up-to-date reflecting the current industry and as a potential buyer, knowledge of it could help you get the best value for money and build common ground with your suppliers. Find out more here.

HR system selection - do you know what you need?

With the heightened expectations of Human Resources to act as a business partner, there is an increasing necessity to implement the information management systems that will enable HR to perform this role. A day spent at the HR Software or Learning Technologies shows will give an indication of how many exciting new technologies, products and providers are now available. It is easy to get caught up in features and functionality, but first there are some fundamental questions to consider.

• Build or buy?
• Single or multi-vendor approach?
• Business implementation strategy?

We have described the key steps of a proven process enabling buyers to select the right HR management system. Read our article here.

Best practice - conditions for success

Read an extract of our report for The Best Practice Club on the strategies used to prepare an organisation for changes designed to improve performance, including political bias, identifying sources of impetus and dealing with those who might 'game the system'.

Product release - Talent Insight™ 3.0

We are announcing a new release of our web-based competence review software tool - Talent Insight™ 3.0. It enables smaller companies and semi-autonomous business units to embark on competence-based performance management quickly and easily.  It's no-nonsense approach appeals to 'practical' managers more familiar with the demands of the job than competence framework theory. It's available 'on-demand' and is quickly customised to your role definitions and organisational constructs.  Find out more here.

Other news

Situational Judgement Test - Case study

BPP Professional Education are leading the way in the use of Situational Judgement for the legal profession.

Read our new case study.

 

Human Resources - Dedicated web site area

We have pulled together a set of products and services specifically designed for HR professionals acting as 'change agents' in their business.  Want some practical help? Come and see how we could make a big difference here.

Christmas Competition survey results

In the weeks before Christmas we asked you to complete a short survey on the use of Situational Judgement Tests (SJT) in your organisation and asked you to try a light-hearted example in order to enter a prize draw.

From a broad set of industry responses, we discovered that only 16% of you are current users of SJTs with the main barrier to their adoption being a lack of understanding of what they can contribute. However, over 80% plan to continue to derive benefits from SJTs - if you would like to join them, do request a complimentary copy of our Executive Briefing on the subject (including the analysis of the survey results) from our Information Request page. A one-page overview of the survey results can also be found here.

We are pleased to announced the competition winners - Jack Lees from TMD Friction Group and Terry Smith from Inchcape; sorry to those other hopeful entrants. So where did this question come from and how was the 'right' answer arrived at? It is explained below and the technique is applicable to many other situations.

Santa's dilemma explained.

The question was loosely based on a standard FBI situational judgement test. It talked of being on an urgent mission and we simply added a seasonal theme and provided a little more information to help you evaluate the alternatives. With situational judgement, what can be 'right' in one organisation might be considered to be sub-optimal in another, or counter-culture or not in line with business strategy. Therefore an internal 'expert group' is asked to rank the given alternatives and these scores averaged to produce a ranking overall. (For an assessment created from scratch, the test designer would generate a larger number of alternative situations and ask an expert group to rate each situation's relevance to the role being assessed. Only the most relevant situations would be included in a test - we thought delivering presents to children relevant to a Santa's helper role though the business about walking around a forest in the early hours of Christmas morning with a torch and map a little far fetched!)

Each of the alternatives therefore has a score and we, as the 'expert group', decided that the most effective strategy was to use the planks to help you cross (5 points) and the most ineffective was to break the ice at the edge (1 point). Your appeal procedure was documented in the competition terms and conditions.

The scoring mechanism employed is the well-recognised and commonly used Most-Least Method - if test user identifies the most effective and least effective as agreed by the expert group, then the formula generates the highest net score, i.e. a score of 4 points in this simple example. However, our views were not shared in terms of the least effective - most rated the least effective as to cross using the bridge (2 points - you might make it to the bridge and back in time, but not likely). Therefore the highest next score of 5-2 was 3 and that was Terry and Jack. No-one chose an alternative strategy leading to the same score.

This is a simple and light-hearted example intended to be fun and to introduce you to the techniques used to design and assess situational judgement in an objective and role-relevant way. If you are interested in learning more about how situational judgement is being used in organisations, please request a complimentary copy of our Exec Briefing on the subject or contact Ian Lee Emery on 0118 989 3555 to discuss it.